the nile.

yea so i needed a break this weekend from gulu, a lot of stuff went on last week that caused alissa and i to take a short getaway to the source of the nile where we relaxed drank beers and rafted 5 grade rapids! it was insane! i was a rafting virgin before this trip but after getting out of the water i know it will not be the last time. i have a video of the trip that i will have to share with you all when i get back! short and sweet for a change.

the maternity ward.

okay so i have received a few emails from you all telling me that i needed to update this thing! sorry things in gulu have been busy busy busy. i have really been enjoying gulu regional referral hospital, where jcrc's clinic is located. the clinic has been great. the patients are many (as a ugandan would say) and the staff is incredible! i seriously feel as though i have been welcomed into a huge family. but because i still have a little less than two months left here i wanted to be able to see more of the hospital, especially since i have been seriously considering medical school as the next step after i graduate this upcoming spring (i will explain more of this change of heart at a later time i promise). so my good friend and doctor, george, hooked it up and got me a spot volunteering in the maternity ward this past week! it began on monday where i witnessed my first, second and third time seeing a women give birth! it was so incredible, bloody, painful and even more incredible to see the miracle of live right before my eyes! tuesday was a bit chaotic in the morning when my friend joy (a girl from the states) and i were the only ones in the ward while three mothers were VERY pregnant (one giving a breech birth - when the feet come first) but luckily once one really started to push the nurses flooded in a took over - delivering another healthy baby! wednesday was probably the highlight of the week when one of the doctors in training decided that i was ready to help with a delivery and put me in an apron and gloves to help nurse beatrice deliver twins- two beautiful baby girls! i took each of the babies to a table where i wiped them off tied their umbilical cords, weighed them, and wrapped them up in their blanks! today while in the ward i went back and visited the mother of the twins, she was so happy to see me and seemed to think it would be a good idea for me to name her girls. SOOOOO much pressure! but after thinking for a long time, while watching one of the nurses in training stitch up a women who torn during labor, i chose them: apio rose and achen patience (the first name of each girl is their acholi name which their mother gave to them and the second are the ones i chose). rose is my middle name given to me by my parents and a name i was planning to give to my daughter one day (but now the pressure is off, so if i dont have baby girl i already gave the name to my adopted acholi daughter). patience is name which is fairly common in uganda and a virtue that i long for pretty much everyday of my life, especially when in uganda, i also saw it fitting because achen was the second twin born. i will post a picture of the babies very soon i promise! yea so i guess i know the basics to delivering a baby thanks to my first four days in the ward. i dont have the same confidence as all of the nurses do but they seem to think they will have me delivering on my own before i leave uganda! crazy. no but really it is so crazy to even think that i was able to see and do all that i did this week! i am thankful for the opportunity that i have had this week and look forward to be able to continue to explore the medical field for the next few months while i am here in uganda.

gulu time.

okay sorry it has been over a week since my last update! things up in gulu have been much much different than kampala...barely any freetime! which is very very good, no complaints at all. okay so i am living in an international house a mile or so outside gulu town with about 10-15 ex-pats from europe and america. the house is so messy, i live on the third bunk, and out of a suitcase, and there is really no hot water, but besides that things are great. one of the girls at the house has a dog, which has been great company as i go through withdrawals from missing my own at home! yea so this past week i jumped right in! my friend george who is the head doctor for joint clinical research center - an hiv testing and counseling center - has taken alissa and i under his wing and allowed us to help him with this clinics in gulu referal hosptal in town. monday - friday are when the clinic is open for patients to come refill their medicine, see the doctor, test and receive counceling. every other week jcrc has clinics in other places around the north - one being pabbo (one of the largest idp camps in the north), and the other hope north (the school i was working at in the fall, which is how i met george). we are headed to both of those places tomorrow and wednesday! friday and saturday last week we had community outreach with the part of the jcrc team and their drama group. it was so amazing to see some of jcrc's patients get together and put on a performace about the dangers of not testing and being hiv+ for a cmmunity and see the response of people who recieved testing afterwards! both days were quite different, even though we did the same thing. friday the community was incredibly welcoming and i was able to interact with everyone, young kids, adults and the elders - which was a major help with my acholi (the most common language spoken in the north). saturday was good as well but for my own personal knowldge in how the testing in carried out because i was able to sit in witht he lab technicians who were drawing the blood and record the test results. as great as that was it was so hard to sit there and have to write a positive on a person's paper and then hand it to a counselor who would then sit them down and talk to them about the next step to receiving treatment, etc. okay sorry time is almost up on the internet...there is much more to come! hope all is well with you all! peace.

getting back in the swing of things.

alright so this week has been a fairly repetitive each day alissa and i have been waking up around 7:30am and reading for a bit, then we take tea and toast before heading into town for the day. i have been showing her around the city from the taxi parks, to the markets, my favorite resturants and bars...we even hiked up to one of the 60+ mosques in kampala and took a brief tour. this particular mosque is the second largest in all of africa and was just opened three months prior to our visit. we had to wear scarves on our heads and around our skirts (they were a bit too short) before we could enter the mosque, and dont you worry we got a few great pictures - i'll have to post them later for you all to see. each afternoon we have been sitting at my favorite bar/resturant called chamber for 3, 4, 5 hours and journaling and reading. the bar has an outdoor balcony which over looks kampala road and is great for people watching! we have made a few friends there as well. the first is ali washington, being a bit funny to us both - the obvious being that my name is ali and then alissa being from washington made the name even better! anywhoo a-w sells cd's and comes everday with new mixes trying to persuade us to buy from him. the first day was ugandan mixes, the next was the westside and shania and yesterday he was trying to convert our table with "christian - praise the lord, praise the lord!" now our second and most loyal friend has been ras-peace. ras-peace is our new rasta-friend who we see everyday at chambers. his sister owns a salon, which he watches for her everday. however, him working for a salon is a bit ironic being that a majority of our conversations have been about keeping our bodies natural. he has explained to us his hatred of the bald-heads as he refers tot he non-rastafari ugandans who dont let their "pillows do the rolling" but rather cut it off to conform to the instutions and polticians that ras-peace doesnt follow...he's quite the character. in school, when he had a bald head, he was called dickens and now he is a well known reggae-mc in kampala. oh their is so much to say about ras-peace i just dont have enough time left on the internet! anyways, last night i was able to go visit one of my friend's homestay families from the fall at their home, which was so wonderful to see a few more familar faces and catch up on the past few months. after eating some sugar cane we headed into town to go to a thursday night favorite - rock night at steakout! needless to say this week have been a very laid back and relaxed week, which i think we have both needed! it has been so nice to be able to catch up with old friends and see familar faces! especially on our walk home yesterday, i was able to walk past the homes of many of the familar faces that i had missed these past five months! we will be leaving kampala on monday and will head off to gulu!

the first real day.

okay well we made it here 48 hours later! the journey began with alissa and i sitting in the san diego airport at our gate after having a gross airport breakfast (definitely went with the mickey-d's hash browns) waiting to board the plane. little did we know the plane was already boarded and we were made aware of that little piece of important knowledge through an annoucment over the speakers: "ALEXANDRA WOLTERS and ALISSA SKOG the plane to NYC is now boarded this is your final boarding call!" So we barely made the first plane of three but hey we decided to try again and headed into NYC for a quick dinner during our layover. Luckily we made it back just in time to sit at the airport bar and have a glass of red wine before boarding our 13 hour long plane to dubai! At the bar we made a few friends one girl who will be in uganda for the exact amount of time we will be - in fact we have the same flight home together and a couple who is going to pick up their adopted son in ethiopia! we wont talk about the 13 hour flight all i can say is it was long. my back hurt and i was so thankful to get off the plane in dubai, that is until we found out that it was 8:30 at night and 94 degrees outside! yea so we got a hotel since our layover was 11 hours. sleeping horizontally was amazing. the city was pretty quite, the highlite being that we got to ride on these small boats across a canal where we had dinner. we woke up the next morning to jump on another plane which would first stop in ethopia for about an hour and drop some people off and then headed to uganda for our final leg of the journey that seemed to never end! needless to say the 48 hour journey was the longest journey of my life! it felt so good to finally change out of the outfit that i will probably never wear again or at leastr not for a few months! we arrived at around 3pm in the afternoon uganda time and waited in the ariport for a good two hours for my friend michael to pick us up. we then drove into town, got a special hire to take us to my homestay family's house. we were so warmly greeted by my ugandan family! they gave us the granny flat in the back of the house to ourselves where we have lived up until this morning. alissa and i pretty much slept our lives away for the first day and a half which bit us in the butt come this morning when we both woke up at 3:43 on the dot and couldnt fall back asleep! haha so we each read half a book until about 7:40am waiting for the rain to stop but it never did so we set off in the rain - luckily caught a taxi - and headed into town! today has consisted of us getting a spanish omlette and white bread with butter along with passon juice for breakfast. we then stopped into the sit office and saw martha and charlotte and the rest of the sit gang and now we are sitting in an internet cafe! yea so that's about it so far! excuse my longwindedness and my grammer mistakes i am on a time crunch with the internet! write soon. peace.